Huck wrote:Looking for further hidden scriptures at the Charles VI was successless.

I found the following details interesting....

... of the 5 dead persons (2 cardinals, 2 kings, 1 pope) one king has a stigma (Death card)

More evidence for a Pazzi Conspiracy date for the CVI, as Sixtis IV was the pope behind it and the resulting war; a post of mine in the "A Palermo Empress for the "Alessandro Sforza"?" thread:

But there is a curious detail no one has previously discussed in regard to the CVI Death card [actually Kate pointed it out in 2014]: Why is the pope's hand punctured with the stigmata? It is unprecedented before or since, and you will find no other depiction of a pope with the stigmata. But if it were meant to depict Sixtus, there would have to be a taunting reason by the Florentines, and indeed there is:

In his bull Spectat ad Romani Pontificis providentiam (6 September 1472), Sixtus relates how some clerics in regions north of the Alps and elsewhere were painting images or preaching about certain female saints with the stigmata, especially Catherine [of Siena]. These images and sermons were produced without the consent and approval of the Apostolic See; but what was most objectionable was that such depictions put these saints on a par with Francis [Sixtus was a Franciscan]. (C. Muessig, “The Stigmata Debate in Theology and Art” in ed. C. Brusati, The Authority of the Word, 2011: 497).

To wit: they portrayed Sixtus in a manner in which he violates his own bull. Actually kind of funny.

As for the CVI Pope proper - a lot of arguments for Eugene IV but Eugene wore the triple tiara. The last Pope to wear the simple egg-shaped headdress without additional tiaras?

Under Boniface VIII (1294–1303) the hood of the regnum was lengthened and the circlet was greatly enriched with precious stones, while toward the end of his papacy a second circlet was added. The increased length had the symbolical meaning of dominion of the una sancta ecclesia over the earth, and demonstrated the meaning of the papal unam sanctum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_tiara

Relevance:

Pope Boniface VIII: Circle 8, Inferno 19

Boniface, for Dante, is personal and public enemy number one. Benedetto Caetani, a talented and ambitious scholar of canon law, rose quickly through the ranks of the church and was elected pope, as Boniface VIII, soon after the abdication of Pope Celestine V in 1294. (There were rumors that Boniface had intimidated Celestine into abdicating so he could become pope himself.) Boniface's pontificate was marked by a consolidation and expansion of church power, based on the view--expressed in a papal bull (Unam sanctam)--that the pope was not only the spiritual head of Christendom but also superior to the emperor in the secular, temporal realm. Dante, by contrast, firmly held that the pope and emperor should be co-equals with a balance of power between the pope's spiritual authority and the emperor's secular authority. Boniface's political ambitions directly affected Dante when the pope--under the false pretense of peace-making--sent Charles of Valois, a French prince, to Florence; Charles' intervention allowed the black guelphs to overthrow the ruling white guelphs, whose leaders--including Dante, in Rome at the time to argue Florence's case before Boniface--were sentenced to exile. Dante now settles his score with Boniface in the Divine Comedy by damning the pope even before his death in 1303 (the journey takes place in 1300): in the pit of the simonists, Pope Nicholas III, who can see the future (like all the damned), mistakenly assumes that Dante is Boniface come before his time (Inf. 19.49-63).

Dante, particularly because of Landino (whose commentary on the Comedia would be released during the Pazzi war in 1481, had a resurgence under Lorenzo. The Florentines surely saw Sixtus IV aggrandizing schemes to find fiefs for his nephews and expand the Papal dominions as an echo of Boniface VIII. The latter retroactively shown before he added the triple tiara (in the case of the CVI depicting the pope without the additional tiaras would visually strip him of Boniface's claims to have temporal power over the empire):

Why is the pope's hand punctured with the stigmata? It is unprecedented before or since, and you will find no other depiction of a pope with the stigmata.

??? Really? There are several pope cards with stigmata aren't there? (Off the top of my head - the Paris, the Geofroy?)

Steve,
Indeed, here: http://cards.old.no/1557-geofroy/tdp/05.jpg. But that deck dates from 1557 in the midst of Huguenot/Catholic tensions culminating in the Amboise Conspiracy a few years later. Who knows to what use the stigmata was being used (where was that deck produced?), but that seemingly merely underscores the political nature of the stigmata. The Prince of Conde' might have been behind anti-Catholic propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis,_Pr ... 80%931569). Events immediately surrounding that 1557 deck: "In February 1556 Henry II of France and the Emperor Charles V had agreed the Truce of Vaucelles, which was meant to last for five years. Almost inevitably the peace didn’t last that long. Pope Paul IV managed to engineer an incident in Italy that triggered his defensive alliance with France. [but obviously not favored by the likes of Conde'] In response Henry II send his main army, under Francis, duke of Guise, across the Alps to aid the Pope. This ended the Truce." http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/ba ... _1557.html

So fair, enough, the papal stigmata appeared after the CVI and thus could be influenced by the CVI; still no precedence before the CVI which is ultimately all that matters (and I freely admit I have little interest in tarot outside of the 15th C - I had looked at papal portraits, not later tarot - my bad). But if you discount a 15th century pope who directly addressed the stigmata (Sixtus IV), what else would the papal stigmata in the CVI Death trump refer to?

And the papal tiara - a single tiara - on the CVI Pope points to a reference to the last pope to wear that, Boniface VIII, not Eugene.

Phaeded

PS Nothing here regarding papal liturgical gloves and the stigmata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episcopal_gloves: "The back of the glove was always ornamented, sometimes with an embroidered medallion or some other form of needlework, sometimes with a metal disk having on it a representation of the Lamb of God, a cross, the Right Hand of God, Saints etc., the disk being sewn on to the glove, or, at times, the ornamentation was of pearls and precious stones." Unquestionably the most relevant image is this from the 2nd quarter of the 15th century of Eugene IV with what looks like the "metal disk" or "embroidered medallion" of the radiate sun one sees around Francis's 'IHS" symbol. Granted there is no additional detail in the center, but if stigmata was being indicated then surely in a colorful manuscript such as this the color red would have been applied, as it was on the almost monochrome Geofroy Pope: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminated ... llID=51703

Godefroy, Tarot de Paris and Dodal Marseille Tarot are French. And the Leber Tarocchi is housed in France and "under suspicion" to have something to do with pope Julius of the Rovere family, which was half-French.

Huck wrote:
Do we have any clear - and older - Italian pope with stigmata?

You probably missed my PS above; reposted here:

Nothing here regarding papal liturgical gloves and the stigmata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episcopal_gloves: "The back of the glove was always ornamented, sometimes with an embroidered medallion or some other form of needlework, sometimes with a metal disk having on it a representation of the Lamb of God, a cross, the Right Hand of God, Saints etc., the disk being sewn on to the glove, or, at times, the ornamentation was of pearls and precious stones." Unquestionably the most relevant image is this from the 2nd quarter of the 15th century of Eugene IV with what looks like the "metal disk" or "embroidered medallion" of the radiate sun one sees around Francis's 'IHS" symbol. Granted there is no additional detail in the center, but if stigmata was being indicated then surely in a colorful manuscript such as this the color red would have been applied, as it was on the almost monochrome Geofroy Pope: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminated ... llID=51703

The image is large so I'm leaving it in the link (unless you want to cut paste the gloves detail). That work has polemical overtones so not sure how to judge it, and again, the lack of red is problematic. A much later image of papal gloves with the 'radiate' nimbus about the Franciscan IHS:

Here is a more 'panegyrical' manuscript of a Franciscan handing an MS to Eugene, and there is no St. Francis stigmata here:

The problem here is the strong possibility that anti-papal sentiments might have informed the iconography of some Pope tarot...and there seems to be a lack of Papal-commissioned portraits or manuscripts showing the actual stigmata. Unfortunately the CVI's Pope's key of St. Peter handle is placed precisely where we'd hope to see the stigmata.

My bottom line on the CVI stigmata is the CONTEXT: the stigmata appears on a slain pope. Even if we can find clear cut images of the pope wearing dot-stigmata gloves such as on the CVI, the context places a pejorative interpretation of it. No way around that...and c.1478 (post Sixtus IV's stigmata bull) explains it.

Can anyone find a more hi-res image of this famous MS showing Eugene IV before the Florentine duomo for it's consecration in 1436? His back is to us, but that looks like a stigmata dot on his raised glove on his hands raised in benediction to the cathedral entrance and/or crozier-crucifix held before him (the latter would rather precisely indicate the pope imitating St. Francis receiving the stigmata before his vision of the crucified Jesus/seraphim in the sky):

This does lead us back to Florence and rules out Eugene as the CVI Pope (he simply did not wear a single crown papal tiara). And the context of a stigmata on a slain pope within a Death card does not seem pro-papal, oddly for a Guelph city.

The "Center" of the World is the Earth (Ptolémé) géocentrism or is it the Sun ( Copernic) heliocentrsim?
Is the calculation of the "ascension droite" on the psCh VI card from Ptolémé sytem (then has to be dated before 1473) or is it from Copernic system (after 1473)?

... the Mantegna Tarocchi pope has no sign, the Vievil Tarot has none (well, it's not totally clear, if this is a French deck). The living Charles VI Pope hides his hands. PMB is not clear, but the Este cards (given to the 1470s) has something there.

I can see now that Eugene is sprinkling holy water with a metal device grasped in his hand at the cross, which is not exactly imitating St. Francis' stigmata, but that dot on his glove does not look like the larger 'radiate medallion' found in the Harley 1340 illumination of Eugene. It looks like a stigmata mark; the detail as well as the Harley 1340 detail of Eugene: